Living dead: Suspended lives during/after gender violence

Abstract

This article takes up a distinction between two times commonly found in works on violence-the time in or during the violence and the time after the violence-and contrasts it with evidence gathered in field work conducted in Spain mainly with victims of gender violence. For these women, life after the violence is (or continues to be) a "living death." With this characterization I seek to further the debate on the notion of life as perceived in sociology, bearing in mind that in that discipline life has been assumed as a given, and arguing instead that life should be understood as "making a life."